The Saint Returns (13 page)

“Grab the girl,” Simon said.
“Do you have a match?”

Kelly quickly produced a flame, which
revealed two
men unconscious on the floor, but no Phyllis. There was
also no attache case.

“She must have run out while I was
tending to Brine,” Simon said. “You watch these goons. I’ll catch
her.”

He hurried through the door, dodged around
piles of
stone, and heard the sound of the girl’s running steps in
the direction of the car. But he was too close behind to allow her any
chance of starting the engine and pulling
away. He had a
glimpse of her jumping over some rocks
and setting off at a
dead run down the hillside.

Before he had chased her far she made the
mistake of
looking back over her shoulder to see whether or not he
was
gaining. She stumbled and fell violently head first,
rolling several times
but never loosing her grip on the
case clutched against her chest.

She was lying face up, gasping for breath, when Simon
arrived at her side.

“Hurt yourself?” he asked.

“My back,” she moaned. “It’s
…
I think
it’s broken.”

“They’ll put it right for you in the
prison hospital,” the
Saint said sympathetically.

He bent down to help her, and she winced with
pain
as she started to raise herself. Simon saw the sudden
movement of her right arm and
averted his face to avoid
most of the
handful of earth she flung at him. Even so she
managed to roll away, and dash off again. This time,
though, he caught her before she had gone twenty
feet
and swung her around, making her
drop the attache case,
and pinning
her arms behind her.

“You want the money for yourself!”
she cried. “You’re
no better than the rest of us. In fact you’re
worse.”

“Worse?” asked Simon mildly.

“Yes.” Phyllis’s big eyes suddenly
welled with tears.
“They … forced me to do it.”

“How?”

“My mother. She needs this dreadful
operation.
There’s only one surgeon in the world who can do it.
In America.
And he charges ten thousand pounds.”

The Saint threw back his head and laughed.

“It’s
true!”
said Phyllis.
“Really.”

“I’m afraid the stage lost a great star
when you de
cided on a life of crime.”

Phyllis looked more genuinely upset than she
had a
moment before.

“Simon,” she said, “you
wouldn’t … really turn me
in would you?”

“Oh, yes. You’re a very naughty
girl.”

Her face crumpled, wet-eyed and kittenish.

“Please! I won’t do anything wrong ever
again, I swear.
If you’ll just let me go.”

Kelly was hallooing from the top of the hill,
unable as
yet to see where they were. Simon looked at Phyllis
and
loosened his grip.

“You promise you’ll live a clean and
decent life, de
voting yourself to good works and never telling any
lies?”

“Oh, I do! I promise!”

“All right, then.”

He let her go entirely. She was unbelieving.

“You mean?”

“Go on,” he said.

She stood on her tiptoes, gave him a swift
kiss, and
turned to run. As she passed the attache case she
snatched
it up and took off down the hill like a rabbit.

“Don’t try to spend any of that money,
though,” Simon
called after her.

“It’s counterfeit!”

She stopped and turned.

“What did you say?” she shouted
through clenched
teeth.

“It’s all counterfeit. Just bait to get
your father to lead
me here.”

The word she said then was not so impressive
as the
way she said it. She took the attache case and hurled it
to the
ground. Then she ran and disappeared among the
trees.

Simon went and knelt by the case, which had
fallen
open, spilling bundles of money—quite genuine Irish
money—out
on the ground. He made certain estimates
of the value of his time, the expense of
repairs to his car,
and other worthy
considerations, and stowed away what
some
less generous people might have considered a dis
proportionate number of
the bundles of bills in his jacket
pockets.
But the Saint was an extraordinarily generous
man, and he saw no reason to make an exception when
being generous with himself.

Pat was coming down the hill.

“Are ye alone?” he called.
“Couldn’t ye catch her?”

The Saint closed the attache case and went to
meet his
friend.

“She’s still running,” he answered.

“Ah, well, and I’m not sorry,” said
Pat. “She was a
darlin’ little thing. Led astray by her ould
man.” He ges
tured toward the castle. “Them’s the two buzzards
I’d
like to take apart.”

“Are they all right?”

“They’re trussed up so they couldn’t
give a flea any
trouble. I’ve a throat as dry as a Bedouin’s wit. What
say
we leave’m
there to stew while we go get a spot o’ some-
thin’
to ease the pain?”

“We’d better bring them along,”
Simon said. “I’d like
to get in touch with Drew before he decides
I’ve made
off with the loot.”

“I wonder where his real daughter
is?”

“I did some checking, and it seems she
definitely flew
to Mexico the day she disappeared from home. By now
she’s
probably enjoying her honeymoon.”

“While we have our few days o’ peace and
freedom
ruined chasin’ after her all over Ireland,” said Kelly.
“Well,
maybe we can get in a day o’ fishin’ anyway.”
He scratched his chin,
and gave Simon a sly sidelong
glance. “Still an’ all, it’s too bad that colleen Mildred, or
Phyllis, or whativer her name really is,
turned out to be such a naughty one. I’m thinkin’ ye might have had more
fun with her than with me.”

The Saint grinned pensively at the moon.

“It’s a small world,” he said cheerfully. “Maybe,
one of
these days, I will.”

THE GADGET LOVERS

Adapted by Fleming Lee

Original Teleplay by John Kruse

1

Ordinarily the Saint concerned himself very
little with
rabbits, considering them—when he considered them at
all—happy creatures hopping about fields, reputedly a
plague to farmers,
but cute subjects for greeting cards
and Disney cartoons. He had not even
devoted much thought to those bunnies of the nubile human kind who
in recent
years have established elegant burrows in cities all over the capitalist world.

Maybe it was the novel notion of bunnies in
Berlin
that brought Simon Templar to the unwonted but not un
pleasant surroundings in which
he found himself on a
particular evening in
late June. Three hours remained
before
the departure of his plane from Tempelhof. Why
not sample the undoubtedly unique incongruities of the
Berlin
Bunny Club?

What Hefner had wrought, the world had
bought—or,
as in this case, borrowed. This was no franchised
Playboy
Club, but
a free appropriation of some of their most pub
licized attractions, with local adaptations. Strange are
the ways of the spread, and decline, of
civilisations.

Ensconced comfortably at the dark bar, with
long-
limbed, bare-shouldered rabbits scurrying over the shad
owy
landscape, Simon had to admit that here, indeed,
was something to stir
the most cynical adventurer’s sense
of audacity: it was not just the female forms; invitingly
outfitted as they were, they presented nothing
particu
larly novel in the way of
human anatomy. It was the idea of the thing—the magnificent impudence of the
fact that this harem of lovely but purportedly untouchable hares
should
be dispensing American steaks, French wines, and
voyeuristic enticements far out here on the eastern
marches, within the very jaws of Asia, surrounded
on
every side by hundreds of miles of
bleak collectivism.

But for all one could have known in the
hermetic dimness of the West Berlin rabbit hutch, it might have been
December
outside instead of June, the remembered
lights of the Kurf
ü
rstendamm might have been the neon
of
Manhattan, and the ugly concrete slabs of The Wall
not many yards away
might have been among the foothills of Rockefeller Center. Here inside,
everything was
all sweetness and dark—soft jazz, good whiskey, and
mass-produced, sanitized
eroticism.

The synthetic aspects were repellent to the
Saint, who now that he’d tried the experience could think of ap
proximately
eight hundred better ways to spend his rare
spare moments than
sitting at a bar visually absorbing
standardized sexuality which had about
as much impact
to it as the identical squares of butter set out on the
din
ing tables.

He drained his glass and had just pulled his
money
from his pocket when his attention was arrested by the
approach of
a most luxuriantly developed young lady
whose display
included things of much greater charm
than the cellophane-covered packets in
the tray at her
waist.

“Zigaretten?”
she said. “May I you serve?”

Simon handed her a bill and accepted one of
the packs.

“You serve very nicely.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, smiling,
and moved away.

Such an ordinary event would not be worth
recount
ing,
except that it is with such seemingly insignificant
encounters that a wait for a plane can turn into an adven
ture.
If the cigarette bunny, in her mammary munificence,
had not come along at just that moment, and if Simon
had not turned to witness the oscillatory retreat
of her pretty little bottom, made rabbit-like by a fascinating
caudal appendage somewhat resembling an overgrown
powder puff, he would not have noticed the
iron-gray
stocky man sitting alone at
a table on the other side of
the
dance floor. Alone, at least, except for several bunnies
who stood around laughing at some story he was
telling.

Simon turned back to the bar and said almost
absently
to the white-jacketed young man behind it, “Another
of the
same, please.”

It took surprisingly few seconds for him to
isolate from the mass of faces in his memory even so relatively obscure
a figure
as William Fenton, ex-Royal Navy, more re
cently with British
Intelligence. Simon’s previous con
tact with him had been brief but
friendly, and now he
had to decide whether he wanted to—or ought to—renew
the acquaintance. There was always the possibility
that
Fenton was involved incognito in some mission or other,
and would not appreciate having his identity
heralded
all over bunny heaven.